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Proven Strategies for Driving More Traffic to Your Web Site

NDIC has been a terrific host for our website. During the tragic Asian tsunami in December 2004, our organization was among those called upon to respond. The immediate scaling of our activities stressed every system - phone lines, physical plant, operational equipment, financial processing. Although our website received the most stress due to unprecedented traffic, it never crashed and NDIC’s team made sure it was able to handle massively increased traffic.

- Thomas Tighe, Director Direct Relief International

Value-Add Hosting

Hosting has become a commodity, which means you can get your site hosted for less than $10 per month. In some cases, companies are charging so little for hosting that they simply cannot afford to provide a reasonable level of support. We’ve seen some that are so cheap that the provider clearly can’t even afford to provide fast, stable hosting. Obviously you should try to steer clear of these companies. However, there are good, reputable companies that provide hosting at a nominal cost. Why, then, should you host with us when our plans start at $30/month and go up from there? In many cases, the answer is that you shouldn’t. If you have a basic “brochure” web site that is comprised of mostly text and graphics, there may be no advantage to hosting with NDIC.

However, if you have a web site that contains programming and databases, there are several advantages to hosting with NDIC. We host primarily clients that we do development work for which means our servers are not overloaded and are very fast. When it comes to dealing with ecommerce sites and sites with a lot of custom programming and database work, it’s more efficient and economical to have everything under one roof. If there is ever a problem with your site, you have only one call to make. There is never any confusion about whether it’s the hosting company’s problem or the programmer’s problem to fix. We are 100% accountable which translates into peace-of-mind for you.

Whenever we need to make configuration changes to the site, or install software, we have total control over the server. This saves a tremendous amount of time over having to create a support ticket in another company’s support system and then wait for them to get back to us. This translates to hundreds of dollars in consulting savings for you, which quickly more than makes up for any disparity in hosting costs.

With a static HTML site, these types of issues rarely come into play, but as the site gets more complex, they inevitably do. For example, if we develop a feature for you which requires a connection between your web site database and one of your internal systems, such as a leads database, we would want to implement a VPN so the connection between the two is secure. We can easily accomplish this with our own servers but we would be restricted from doing that on almost any other hosting company’s servers.

In addition to standard shared hosting, we offer dedicated hosting services for projects that require their own environment. We are also experts in Cloud Computing and can help you setup a redundant and highly scalable virtual server configuration in a public or private cloud.

NDIC offers a managed hosting service that go well beyond the offerings of bargain-basement hosting companies, including:

Performance & Reliability. Low-cost hosting companies achieve low prices by oversubscribing their servers. That means that during periods of high activity, these servers are prone to slowing down and crashing. We see this routinely with customers who have hosted at GoDaddy and other low-cost hosts. NDIC undersubscribes, which means our servers are always fast and there is always room for your site to grow.

Better Security. Because we manage more than 90% of the sites we host, there are very few external users of our servers and all of those users are well-known to us. Fewer users and no anonymity means that we are much less prone to hack attempts. We also employ advanced security solutions (described below).

Single Point of Contact. If we help manage your site and host your site, you have only one call to make if anything goes wrong. This is particularly important when there is an urgent issue since you don’t waste time trying to figure out who to call. It also eliminates cases where your web developer says the problem is with the host and the host insists the problem is with the web developer and you are stuck in the middle trying to sort it out.

Advanced Services Included. As part of every account, we include the following services:

High availability, redundant DNS service to ensure the domain is always accessible from anywhere.

DDOS protection (Distributed Denial of Service – this protects against the site getting flooded with bot traffic)

New Directions In Computing provides web design, web development,web hosting and SEOweb marketing to companies in Santa Barbara,Ventura, Oxnard, Camarillo, Santa Maria and San Luis Obispo. We offer professional web site design, graphic design and logo design as well as web marketing, including social networking, email marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). We are experts in a number of high quality web applications including Joomla, WordPress, x-cart and Moodle. We develop custom web applications in a variety of technologies such as PHP, ASP, Ruby/Rails, Python/Django and Java. We also develop mobile web sites and mobile apps for iPhone and Android.